Day #37 - Where are the Flowers for my Hair?

Our third transit day and thankfully our last for about a week since we definitely feel the need to stay still for a bit!

Today's objective was to get from Seattle to San Francisco which was just one short plane hop. 

You can describe the length of a plane journey in time or in the amount of refreshments you get served. This was a coffee and a bag of pretzels flight. 

First we had to drop off the hire car which had served us well over the past two weeks. We certainly added to its mileage total. Then a relatively painless check-in (for some reason we have to do it in person and not online with the type of ticket we have) and the inevitable security screening (every airport seems to have different systems so always 'dun' trying to work out what items they need where, is it shoes on or shoes off?). Time to chill before boarding and admire a rather grand piece of wooden art.

The flight itself was uneventful as all flights should be. We got to know a lovely lady, Julia, who sat next to us who was traveling to San Francisco to celebrate her sister's wedding. We soon established that we were all in a similar age bracket and so felt comfortable sharing grievances about technological takeovers, AI infiltration and tipping etiquette differences between countries. We all felt better after our cathartic conversation!

As we flew into the city, James was able to capture some lovely images of the city from his window seat including of course, the iconic Golden Gate Bridge.

Arrivals was also seamless and it was one of those magical rare occasions where we walked into baggage claim, picked up our suitcases immediately with no waiting and walked straight out the building into a taxi! If only it was that painless every time!

For the next few weeks we are staying with friends of James which is a lovely change from the hotel living we have been doing for the past five weeks.  I'll let James explain more about who we are staying with in future posts, but for now, let me say that José and Javier have both made us feel very welcome in their respective homes in San Francisco.

For our first evening we kept is simple and stayed in so that old friends could catch up over food, which, as you might have guessed, was Mexican!